re: How to tank as pretty much everything

How to tank as pretty much everything: The advice and musings of a self proclaimed "not alltogether awful tank".

Disclaimer: what I'm about to discuss pertains to all tank classes except monks and sorta dks. If you would like more info on monks just ask me and I will talk your fucking ears off. (No seriously ask daze I fucking will)

Weird terms Taiwei totally didn't make up:

-Active mitigation: A defensive ability you have that has a short (10 second or under) cooldown and requires one of your class resources to use

-Point mit: your active mitigation with a numerical value.

Percentile mit: Your active mitigation that gives you X % chance to do this or reduces X% physical damage.

Fixate: the three seconds after a taunt where the boss is forced to attack you. Cannot be out threated but can be overridden by another

taunt.

Threat window: the eight seconds after a taunt (except dark command and I think the paladin reckoning or whatever those fabulous mofos use to make shit hit them) where you are 200% more threatening.

Threat in MoP

What was previously the core mechanic in tanking, threat is now baseline once you have gear somewhere within the ballpark of your dps. All tanks now passively have 500% increased threat, meaning that mele must do 510% and ranged 520% of the damage you are doing to take threat from you. Now you're thinking sweet as long as I don't have super amazing dps like taiwei in my raid I'll never loose threat. Well there's one problem with that, actually two.

First issue is the start of the fight. Right now about 80% of your attack power (read damage) comes from vengeance. And many dps classes are dependent upon their CDs and trinkets for dps. Well what do you not have at the star of the fight? Vengeance. What do dps have? FUCKING EVERYTHING JESUS FUCKING CHRIST ROB CAN SHADOW WORD CUDDLE HARD AT THE START OF THE FIGHT WHY ARE ENHANCEMENT SHAMANS EVEN LEGAL LIKE FUCK WHY ARE YOU ALLOWED TO DO A MILLION DAMAGE WITH STORMLASH AND HAVE A FUCKING ELEMENTAL THAT DOES LIKE EIGHT BAJILLION DAMAGE AND STILL BE ABLE TO HAVE WHITE MELE SWINGS I REALLY NEED BETTER PUNCTUATION HI DAZE I KNOW YOURE THE ONLY ONE STILL READING THIS STOP USING STAM TRINKETS YOU LITTLE BITCH. So basically at the start of the fight you're fighting a loosing race. Easiest way to fix this is to taunt, hammer everything you've got in the threat window, then (because most taunt cooldowns are 8 seconds) taunt again. By then you have 16 seconds worth of vengeance and 12 seconds of 200% threat.

Not being dead

As a tank in mists of pandaria you have two major ways of keeping your sorry ass alive. You have your major cooldowns, and active mitigation. If you imagine tanking as trying to not piss off your homeowners association, active mitigation is cutting your grass, and your cooldowns would be equivalent to redoing your wiring to make sure you meet fire code. (Fuck analogies man I can't do them). Anyway the best way to survive is to plan out when to use the resources you have at your disposal. Now you may be thinking "thanks for the vague and generic statement Taiwei now what the fuck do you mean". What I mean is your active mitigation are all suited to different scenarios. Remember those words I made up at the start of this thing? Well now I'll explain them.

Percent mitigation is your active mitigation that gives you x % chance to do something or reduces physical damage by x%. Your percent mitigation is going to be your physical damage reduction and this mitigation is modified by your mastery. So what is physical damage... On 78.58%(that's the actual percent, no really) of fights in siege the only relevant source of physical damage will only be mele swings. Annnnd on most bosses the most damage you will be taking will be from the boss will be his white mele swings. Now if you're thinking "sweet that means if I just spend all my resources on this type of mitigation I'll take the least amount of damage" you're actually correct, but fuck you, your job is not to take the least amount of damage. As a tank you are trying to stay alive. For those of you thinking "Taiwei you're drunk stop writing this" you're probably right, however taking the least amount of damage is not always the best way to survive. The best way to survive is to take the least amount of spike damage you can. By not taking spike damage you are making your healers job infinitely easier because while you may require more total healing, you will can get more of that healing from hots and such and therefore require fewer of the healers gcds, and "oh shit" heals. So while mele swings may make up the largest portion of damage you take, it's typically never the spikiest damage. "Sooooo this percent mitigation nonsense is useless on 78% of the fights then?". Not quite. While mele swings themselves are not terribly spikey, their interaction with the magic damage you take is. So let's imagine were in a fight like norushen and well take illuminati for example (sorry lumi). In most scenarios if I need a heal several things are going to happen first.

-0 seconds Taiwei takes it to the face like a bad

-1 seconds Lumi notices Tai's nearly dead status

-1.1seconds Lumi curses Tai under her breath

-1.2seconds Lumi decides whether or not she wants to be a merciful godess today and allow Taiwei to live despite his stupidity

- 1.6 seconds Dementis decides it is the optimal time to begin popping bubbles with aspect of the pack on

- 1.7 seconds Lumi casts power word: shield on Dementis

- 3.2 seconds global cooldown ends and Lumi begins casting flash heal

- 3.3 seconds Taiwei falls over like the bad tank he is

- 6 months Warlords of Draenor is released

- 1 year 12 days Flash heal's cast completes because fuck haste as a disc priest

- 1 year 13 days Toaster receives the packets from flash heal being cast

While this timeline may not be completely accurate (Warlords might release earlier) the point remains the same. There is a gap time between you receiving damage and your healer recognizing it and being able to heal you. This means that the more health you have after the spike the bigger a window you give your healer. It's typically not the big tank swap debuff that kills you but the mele swing afterwards. So by taking less mele swing damage before and after these big magical spikes, you make yourself much less susebtible to being globaled into the ground (I know I spelled that wrong I'm somewhat dyslexic give me a break). So now that you get the philosophy behind its use lets figure out when to use this nonsense. To do that lets take a list of questions you should be asking yourself.

1. Do I have the resources to use this mitigation

2. Will the boss be punching me for the duration of this mitigation (usually 6 seconds for paladins it's 4)/ will I be taking physical damage

3. If I use this mitigation will I have the resources to use my point mitigation after the next spike

4. Am I able to survive the interim between now and the next time I have the resources for mitigation without a heal from either a healer or my point mitigation

5. Is the damage I'm taking actually block able/ dodge able/ parry able if that's what my mitigation does

Bonus question

Am I capped on resources, and am I a class (warrior/paladin) whose % mitigation causes them to do more damage.

If the answer to the top 5 questions is yes then merry Christmas you can use your percent mitigation.

Point mitigation

Your point based mitigation, as discussed above, is your active mitigation that either heals you or (if you're a prot warrior) gives you an absorption shield. So let's get into what it means and how it works. This mitigation is entirely built upon vengeance. If you do not have vengeance using your point mitigation is pissing into the wind.Another limitation of your point based mitigation (unless you're a warrior) is that it is entirely useless at full health, and this entirely reactive, which is against typical tank philosophy. Now let's look at the strong points of it. With vengeance point mitigation is the most overpowered thing known to man, and, the scenarios in which you are using it,you typically just received a massive magical fuck you, therefore being full to the brim with vengeance. Furthermore it's healing that you control,and as a tank you're typically not distracted about everyone else's health ,and know when you accidentally let shuffle drop (damn it daze), and therefore are the best reactive healer for yourself. Another strong point of point mitigation is it's more flexible in terms of resource cost, as opposed to % mitigation which is all or nothing. (Ex. Shield block and savage defense cost 60 rage and shield barrier and frenzied regeneration can be used with only 20, but can go up to 60). So how do we use it and when. This is where warriors kind of diverge in this guide so ill over the after. You want to use your point based mitigation in a couple scenarios the first one is after a big magic spike because you'll be flush with vengeance and will be low on health and thus unlikely to overheal. Another place point mitigation works is in desperate scenarios, if you need to buy time, healing yourself can give you those precious seconds for the healers to get you the last scenario is a little weird so I've got a simple inequality to figure it out.

A= your healing output

B= boss damage output

C= your over healing

D= your health

T= time you will be tanking the boss

(A/T)/(B/T)-C)>1

Orrrrr if the left side is < 1

((A/T)/(B/T)-C)(T)(B)<D

Essentially this means that if you can mostly outheal the damage you're taking don't bother with % mitigation. Warriors the same rules apply just use your shield barrier right before the magic spike (Or if you want to be a badass,and you have the 2 piece use it immediately after like the other classes and get both the healing, and a vengeance amped shield barrier)

Cooldowns

Depending on your class you have several long damage reduction cooldowns at your disposal (unless you're a gaddamn paladin and you stole all the fucking cooldowns). An important thing to consider when thinking about using your cooldowns is the way they work with each other, which is to say, poorly. An easy way to understand it is if you have a 50% damage reduction cooldown it also reduces the effectiveness of any other cooldown you have up at the time by 50% because that cooldown is now only applying its reduction to 50% of the damage. So that means you don't want to roll several CDs at once unless absolutely needed because they will be less effective.There are two things you want to look at when you're planning out when to use your cooldowns. If you are using them proactively (as you should be) you want to look at how much damage you can reduce. For example if you roll shield wall during a corrosive blast you'll get a lot more damage reduction for your buck than if you were to do so during a period of just mele swings. And in line with what I discussed earlier, you want to find the biggest spikes and cover those with a cooldown. Now in a scenario where you're using your cooldowns in a moment of desperation, (this is not optimal but tanking is messy shit happens) you want to look at how much effective health you can get. Now your effective health is essentially the amount of damage you can take before you keel over and die. This number takes into account the health you have and the amount of damage reduction you have. In a desperation scenario you can view effective health as a measurement of time, so the more effective health you have, the more time you give your healers to get you back to full. So while damage reduction cooldowns cause one another to exponentially decay combining a health cooldown with a damage reduction cooldown multiplies the effect. So let's take shield wall and last stand for example. Shield wall gives you 40% damage reduction and, if you assume you have no other cooldowns rolling it essentially gives you 40% increased effective health. Last stand gives you increases your health pool by 30% and gives you that 30% health putting you at 130% of your normal effective health. However if you roll these at the same time you get 40% damage reduction on 130% of your health, thus multiplying their effectiveness in terms of effective health,putting you at 182% effective health. This principle also applies to regular old heals if you are not at max health. The more health you have the more health gets multiplied by that defensive cooldown giving you more effective health, and therefore time.

The type of fight you are in will dictate which cooldowns you will want to roll and when. Some codons have restrictions like only reducing magic damage, some require the enemy to have been there when you rolled the cooldown (Demo shout). Another important thing to consider is the type of encounter you are facing. Siege typically has 3 types of encounters: Predictable spike, ramp up, and hybrid. Predictable spike fights are the easiest to manage cooldowns for because you know exactly when the damage is coming and can have a cd up before then. A perfect example of a predictable spike fight is immersius. He has one very strong tank swap ability, and his mele swings typically aren't threatening. For fights like that you'll want to reserve your cooldowns for when you know spikes are coming

You should keep in mind all of these things when deciding when to use your cooldowns. Ramp up fights are more difficult to manage your cooldowns because you want to both be proactive in your cooldown use, but also be sure that you have complete coverage for the dangerous portions. A fight like malkorok is an good example of a ramp up fight. Fights like that you want to use little to nothing for the first brief portion, then spend all of your resources on active mitigation and keeping 100% uptime on whatever % mitigation you have, finally when you are unable to sustain your active mitigation roll your cooldown, and try to use whatever active mitigation you have to sustain yourself until the tank swap. Hybrid fights require the most coordination of interplay between mitigation and cooldowns. Fights like iron juggernaut are hybrid fights because they have a dangerous tank swap spike attack as well as sustained damage from strong mele swings, or normal mele swings in conjunction with a dot.The most efficient way to deal with fights like these is to take the initial stack or so without cooldowns just healthy use of point based mitigation.after that first stack. Between the first and second stack you'll want to roll a minor cooldown that will expire just after the application of the second stack, and then fill the interim with whichever active mitigation is best suited for the fight, finally you should roll a minor to moderate cooldown for the third stack and use that cooldown to ride out the stack damage. What I've given here is an ideal situation, if you've ever raided with us you understand that happens like once a millennia. Don't be afraid to use cooldowns early if you feel you need them just be sure that you have another cooldown waiting for when you planned to use the first one. If you do not have another cooldown ask a healer for an external with some advance notice and keep on trucking.

Now the strategy I outlined earlier is for tanks who are at or below the gear suggested for the content they're tanking. If you are at or above the gear level needed to tank the boss you're at your active mitigation should be sufficient to keep you alive. You can then hoard your cooldowns for when shit gets real. As any paladin can tell you, tank cooldowns make you an unkillable monstrosity (no really, it's actually impossible to kill a paladin under the effects of ardent defender).

Boss positioning

As a tank you get the all exclusive right to be directly in the boss's nut sack, however your other raiders do not have this privilege so you should do your best to help them make do. First you want to ensure that both your position and the position directly behind the boss is devoid of fire. Being a mele myself,I know that when given the choice between their own safety, and keeping100% uptime on the boss, most mele will choose the latter.("Disc priest will fix it"- Taiwei in the middle of a foul stream). Another important consideration in choosing boss positioning is if there are adds that you can cleave off of, if so position the boss there, and have your mele love you forever.

Your Cotank

You and your co tank should be the tightest bromance on the team (or if you tank with a lady she should be your lady bro). Because they are only other mofo bad enough to have the boss punch them and not give a single fuck, and more often than not, they are also the only other person who understands how you're supposed to tank the boss. As such they are the most likely to understand when you need a hand and how to give you one. Know your Cotank's toolkit as well as you know your own, if you play different classes, use that synergy to your advantage. For example if you are a monk and your cotank is a paladin you will have very different strengths and weaknesses. Taking the galakras fight for example, when the adds are out a monk is going bring much better damage and cc on the ground. However once the boss hits the ground, the paladins ability to overcome the sustained magic damage will far outshine the monk's. Keep these synergies in mind when you plan out the strategy of a fight, cover your cotank's weaknesses and play to your own strengths. Furthermore your cotank can save your ass every day of the week but you need to make sure you communicate what you need, and when. Hand of sacrifice, vigilance, intervene, avert harm, army of the dead, gore fiends grasp, symbiosis, tranquility, all these are things that can save your ass, but relying on your cotank's intuition isn't always the best option. The reason being that unless they're Taiwei (I know you're thinking about trying a mastery build for siegecrafter, don't you dare daze) they may see you dip and pop their thing when you were just planning to pop a cooldown and a self heal yourself, thus wasting both cooldowns. Also you can use their cooldowns as your own. This may sound weird but essentially if you are unable to survive taking the boss back let your cotank know, and most of the time they can roll their own cooldowns and give you the time to get back where you need to be. This however doesn't work if you don't let the other tank know. For example on siegecrafter if I can't get my shredder down,I need to make sure Ava knows and is prepared to take a fourth stack. If I leave him in the dark he may either A- not have a cooldown for it and die, or B- think I won't get it down and waste a cooldown. In addition to the damage of the fight,your cotank is your best resource for assistance with positioning the boss, by synchronizing your abilities to force the boss to move to your locations you can get the boss in the exact spot, and facing the exact direction you need to. In the same vein you should be ready when your cotank needs assistance. You should always have a plan for when you hear "I need a hand" from your cotank.

Your healers

These guys aren't quite as important as they were in previous expansions, however your healers are going to be your best companion after your cotank. For the most part these guys will have a passive heal they will keep on you, and that will be the majority of what you get from them. So as a tank you need to understand how much an eternal flame, life bloom, rapture power word shield, or riptide/earth shield will do for you. Most of your healers spot heals will be going out to the rest of the raid so self sustaining is a must. If you need a spot heal usually you will need some form of self healing to give your healer enough time to recognize the danger, and get a gcd for you. Your healers generally learn to respond to the rhythm of damage as a whole on the raid, so if you notice yourself taking a lot of damage in a particular spot, let your healer know that's when you will need healing so they can plan accordingly. Healers are just like tanks in that if they can play proactively they will have a much easier time, help them do this by communicating relevant information to them ("Lol Tai you're one to talk about communicating relevant information you spend the entire fight talking about random shit"-entire AF raid team). If you feel like you're short a cooldown, especially on ramp up fights, you can treat your healers focus healing you as a cd. Very little can outpace a healer chain casting on you. In addition to being a wealth of healing these guys also have cooldowns out the ass. Every healer save for shaman have a decent cooldown they can put on you in a tight spot, you can use these in place of your cooldowns you may have wasted, or to supplement your own. Also these guys have raid cooldowns that you can sometimes use for yourself. So on a high movement fight like spoils you can use a disc priests barrier essentially as a personal for you and the mele. Furthermore you should know when your paladins are using devo and you can treat it much like a legendary meta proc.

Resource pooling

One of the many things you'll want to keep in mind during a tank swap is your defensive resources. About 50% of the bosses in siege have downtime for the tanks while not tanking the actual boss, this means that you can use that time to prepare for taking the boss again. When taunting the boss you should be going in there with a full rage bar, or 5 points of fabulous power, or15 stacks of elusive brew etc ect. This doesn't mean you want to sit on yor resources the entire time (especially if they can be used offensively), however,you should ensure that you have full resources when retaunting the boss even if it means wasting some at the end. BUT TAIWEI IF I WASTE MY RESOURCES AS A TANK I DIE. Thank you for that rhetorical segue guy, but you're still 0/10 so far, while that statement is correct it's only correct when you're not tanking the boss. When not tanking the boss your % mitigation will do absolutely nothing (except if you're a paladin using SotR to soak an arcing smash on malkorok, but if you're that much of a G you're probably too good to be taking advice from a bad like me), furthermore, as mentioned above, without vengeance your point mitigation will be donkey penis. Let's do some example math to make this a little more clear, good idea Taiwei, thanks Taiwei.

From some quick observation of everyone's favorite tank Ava on the heroic malkorok encounter

Mean vengeance for on boss time~ 378k

Median vengeance for on boss time~ 212k

Mean vengeance for off boss time ~62k

Median vengeance~ 51k

So for the sake of example well use the median vengeance for on boss time because of the massive distortion from the blood rage period. (Fun fact blood rage and period are synonyms during that time of the month). Anyway if we use that number and the median off boss time number (because of a 20% distortion from things like implosion), we can find out the differential in value of a point of holy power. So right off the bat we know that an SotR is worth nothing while off the boss, so let's look at an eternal flame. Assuming there's no over healing the on the boss eternal flame is worth ~6 times that of the off boss one in total healing. Now if we factor in over healing, the over healing on the word of glory portion of the off the boss eternal flame would be about 80%, with the hot portion (ha, hot eternal flame) being around 85% over healing (The hoof's haste break points happen to line up perfectly with ancient miasma damage timing otherwise it'd probably be closer to 100%). Now for on the boss, the word of glory element sat at around ~10% over healing with the hot portion around 5%. So a point of holy power while on the boss is worth 216 times that of a point off the boss in terms of effective healing, and about 6 times in potential healing. The moral of this mathematical tale is twofold, the first is make sure you have your shit when the boss is punching you, the second being that the decisions you make in terms of active mitigation while on the boss are for more significant than those off the boss.

Composure

One of the most important hallmarks of a fantastic tank is composure. Mistakes happen. A lot. In fact, looking at a kill log for heroic protectors where I was tanking, I made approximately 72 mistakes in gcd usage from the perspective of maximizing healing and about 22 for maximizing damage. So that basically means that more than 10% of the time I was not pushing the button that would best keep me alive. I was however alive at the end of the fight and never dipped below 40% health. You can fuck up. You cannot freak out about it. The danger of mistakes exponentially increases the closer together they are. When you make a mistake, most of the time it can be easily fixed with about 30 seconds of solid play. However, if you respond to that mistake by getting nervous those mistakes will multiply, and you will need some form of deus ex machina to set you back to the normal rhythm. If you do make a major mistake that requires something major to ensure your continued survival the best way to remain calm is know your fail safes. Your failsafes can be either your own cooldowns that haven't been assigned to a specific mechanic or a specific healers external. Know this button and have it easily key bound, or make sure that healer knows they're on call if shit gets real. If you do find yourself in a tight spot do not get nervous and use cooldowns already assigned to other mechanics, don't dig yourself into a deeper hole, fix it, or let your cotank or healers know you need help fixing it. One of the easiest ways to remain calm when everything goes to shit is, before and during the fight, think about what you will do in certain nightmare scenarios. For example in the dark shamans encounter, if daze goes down during bloodlust, my plan is to use the fortifying brew I've saved all encounter, wait for the next ashen wall , and cleanly place it then disarm harrom and use all my movement cooldowns to reach the downstairs team and taunt swap with Ava. (My plan should Ava go down is to immediately alt f4 and begin uninstalling the game, because if there's a boss that can kill the hoof were just not going to kill it). Knowing what you're going to do should shit hit the fan makes it 100 times easier to calmly execute your job, as opposed to coming up with a plan on the fly as things are happening. Your raid is like a hammock kit, you get way more fucking pieces than you need to get the job done, if it doesn't 1 shot you you've got more than enough shit to fix it, just know what you need and ask for it.

Learning to tank

Being a new tank sucks. Like a lot. It's hard, you have to learn how to tank while you're also learning how to do the encounter as your tank class, and the dps are going to outgear you and make threat a bitch. Not to mention if you fuck up you don't just do less damage or healing, you keel over and die. Now while this sounds really unappealing, you can make this process a lot less painful. You can do this by breaking up the learning into different sections by going with friends. Learning everything at once is extremely difficult however you can make certain portions much easier by brining certain friends. You can bring an over geared healer to make surviving less stressful and allow you to learn the encounter and positioning. While you'll still take big spikes your healer can cover those and you can know for next time when to roll CDs. You can also bring a geared hunter to alleviate the burden of threat with misdirect allowing you to focus on the tanking mechanics. Furthermore after you've gained a basic understanding of your class and the encounters I suggest going back in and focusing on one aspect of the fight or of your class and attempting to optimize the way you handle it. For example one dark shamans flex I decided I would focus solely on good ashen wall placement. If you ask illuminati that fight was he'll because I did a shitty job with my active mitigation and the rest of the mechanics. However, from that day forward placing ashen walls has been second nature for me. If you attempt to learn it all at once you will be overwhelmed (ask daze about how we threw him in the deep end). A lot of skills go into being a great tank, learn to be great at one thing at a time.

Vengeance

So vengeance and I sort of have a love hate relationship, but before I get into that, let's discuss the design philosophy behind it. Vengeance in its current implimentation was intended to do 3 things. First was to ensure that because tanks gearing to survive usually took secondary stats that did not modify their dps in any way, and therefore only had their dps increase come from suboptimal defensive stats, and the base main stat. This meant that tank dps increased linearly via attack power, and dps's dps increased in a multiplicative series. So as you got more gear, the damage gap between dps and tanks became such that dps would be able to out threat tanks. The second reason that led to the advent of vengeance was the introduction of active mitigation. In a world without vengeance your point based mitigation would be either useless or overpowered. Because your % based mitigation is naturally dependant upon the boss's damage blizzard needed something to ensure that the choice between your point or % mitigation was always that, a choice. Lastly vengeance was implemented to avoid the pitfall of support classes in other games. That pitfall is that their damage is useless, and the difference between a good support class player, and a bad one was trifling dps wise (looking at you Rift bards). Now that we know what vengeance is supposed to do lets look at its actual uses. Meter whoring like a boss. "But how do I meter whore like a boss Taiwei?". Good question daze. Step one, get a permission slip signed by your healers. Step two, understand how the fuck vengeance works (there's a section later). Step three, avoidable mechanics, so long as they would be a vengeance increase, should now be treated as mechanics that you just work around. Most of these mechanics are designed around one shotting sissy clothies, you are not a sissy clothie. There's actually another purpose to the vengeful shenanagins I'm advocating, and that is survival. Yes, taking it to the face sometimes can aid in survival. Remember that section about why blizzard implemented vengeance? Well they balanced everything tanks do around vengeance. Our damage and self healing are both entirely based around having vengeance. Tanks have the ability to essentially "rise to the occasion", and hold their own just enough to beat out what ever damage they're taking. However this means that for those periods where you don't have the boss, you are merely mortal like the sissy clothies in your raid. So being able to maintain some of that godly power drying your off boss time will allow for both better survival and dps.

VENGEANCE HOW IT DOES THE WERK?

In its simplest form vengeance is you gaining 1.5% of the unmitigated damage you took over the last 20 seconds as attack power. Now let's get fancy. Vengeance recalculates every time you receive damage, and vengeance decays. This means every time you take damage your vengeance number will change by an amount equal to one twentieth of the difference between the damage you took, and the damage number it's replacing in the formula. This also means that every second you don't take damage your vengeance will be reduced by 5% OF THE CURRENT TOTAL NOT THE ORIGINAL(this means its decay is much more like half life). So let's figure out what this means practically. If you want to have the most vengeance you need to know whether you should try to update, or hold onto your vengeance.

Scenarios to update vengeance

- Your damage taken last 20 sec<Or =incoming damage

- You can increase the length of a decent vengeance buff right before a tank swap

Scenarios to hold onto vengeance

- Incoming damage will lower the mean damage for the last 20 sec>5% of current vengeance

These scenarios are kinda vague, so I'll give some actual tanking situations in which you'd want to do either of these.

Nazgrim executes you, and your cotank taunts. Hold onto your vengeance when tanking the adds by stun locking them so they cannot mele you, and thus reduce your average vengeance.

Siegecrafter blackfuse applies his third stack to you, and your cotank taunts. Update your vengeance. The difference between siegecrafters mele and the shredders is not significant, furthermore there's a fuckton of aoe damage that will drastically reduce your vengeance, should it be allowed to update it.

Other vengeance mathematical quirks

- vengeance will make up an average of 80% of your attack power (read damage) on most siege fights in normal and above difficulty.

- When taunting you will gain approximately 10% of the previous tank's vengeance immediately before even receiving damage. (Approximately 10% this rule may have other limitations or modifiers, I haven't done enough testing)

-Vengeance gains in the first 5 seconds after taunting are increased ~200%.